Top image: Entrance to Ségognole 3 cave south of Paris, in the Noisy-sur-École region.

In a frequently explored cave located just south of Paris, researchers identified the outlines and features of what might be the world’s oldest three-dimensional map.

On the floor and in the walls of the French cavern known as Ségognole 3, there are a series of carvings that clearly represent horses and the female human form. But beyond these unambiguous engravings, scientists Médard Thiry from the MINES Paris Center of Geosciences and Anthony Milnes from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Adelaide discovered further cuts and markings in the cave that have an entirely different meaning.

Overlooked before, these carvings in the cave floor serve as a representation of the surrounding exterior landscape. What the carvings form is essentially a scale model of the geological features of the immediate area, which allows the viewer to know exactly what they can expect to find when they leave the comfort and safety of the cave when they venture outside.

“The carved motifs and their relationship with natural features in the sandstone of the shelter can be compared with major geomorphological features in the surrounding landscape,” the researchers wrote in an article about their find published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. “The engraved floor is not quite a map, but more like a model in miniature of the surrounding landscape, potentially a world-first 3D-model of a Palaeolithic territory.”

A Model-Making People with an Eye for Detail

The model of the region’s Noisy-sur-École landscape carved into the floor at Ségognole 3 includes an extraordinary amount of detail, forming a truly impressive scaled-down version of that landscape that would have been made from memory.

According to Thiry and Milnes, the artists who created these lifelike rock art carvings belonged to hunter-gatherer groups who sought shelter in Ségognole 3 approximately 20,000 years ago. Their artwork served as decorations and in the case of the map as a representation of the broader world in which they traveled in search of food.

Notably, the engravings of the horses and the female human were located right beside the map. Among other things this suggests all the carvings were made around the same time by the same artist or group of artists.

In addition to marking out figures the various carvings formed depressions or ditches that channeled the water that flowed through the cave. Some of the water collected in the vulva-like depression that was included in the female form, and it seemed this didn’t happen by accident.

“The natural geomorphological features of the Ségognole 3 shelter provided an ideal setting to imprint this fragmented representation of femininity, a theme that was evidently significant during the Upper Paleolithic,” Thiry and some of his colleagues wrote in a paper published in 2020, during the earliest stages of Thiry’s research (he hadn’t yet partnered with Milnes at this point).

Natural basin formed in a rocky outcrop in the Noisy-sur-École region near Paris.

In fact, the cave floor had been skillfully and precisely engraved not just to create striking images, but also to steer water flow through a series of interlocking channels, depressions, fractures and basins that would carry it to different parts of the cave. The three-dimensional mapping procedures of the Paleolithic cave dwellers were on full display here as well, as the slopes and indentations in the map’s cave-floor surface mimicked the hills of the Noisy-sur-École landscape while accurately representing their relationship to nearby rivers, lakes, and deltas.

Certainly, as Thiry and Milnes admit, drawings and carvings in other ancient caves in Europe and elsewhere do include maps of surrounding regions, with landscape features being faithfully recreated. But these have been made strictly in two dimensions, not demonstrating the perceptiveness and the imagination involved in the cave dweller creations found at Ségognole 3.

Cave Dwellers with Imagination and Vision

As of now this is a unique discovery, and one that reveals some fascinating information about the hunter-gatherer people who roamed the lands of the Noisy-sur-École 20,000 years ago.

What their find shows, the researchers say, is that Paleolithic peoples were capable of imaginative abstract thinking, in addition to being excellent observers.

The combination of the carvings of the horses, the female form, and the 3D map demonstrate a high level of intelligence and perceptiveness. The earlier versions of modern humans who created this topographic mural accomplished something rather remarkable for their time, which is made clear by the fact that no other example of this type of sophisticated 3D mapping has been discovered at any other Paleolithic site.

This groundbreaking find is a true first, and it may be destined to remain that way for quite some time.